Tag Archives: composite images

I’m currently working on the scattergun principle – too many projects heading off in different directions. So, to make some space in my head, I am putting this here, and would welcome any comments. As background, the Thames Valley Group is putting together an exhibition to encourage students to start thinking about making a Body of Work. The theme of the exhibition will be Time. I have lots of ideas for this, but what is interesting me at present is the idea of representing the concept of Now.

I am lucky enough to have access to a range of old photographs of my house and the area around it, as some of the previous occupants were newsworthy in their time. Whether or not I will refer directly to their story remains to be seen, but I have started out by merging two images of the same spot from the 1920s and the present in various ways to see how they look. See below.

For the purposes of this work, number 3 seems to work best, although I like the contextualisation of number 2 as well.

I also used Photoshop to merge a couple of images of the house’s interior in Photoshop. These are simply test shots, so please ignore the plastic bag and knitting in the second one. The older images in this case were from some estate agent’s details for the house in the early 1960s.

Purely by chance I then happened to come across a series in Lensculture by the Albarrán Cabrera team, whom I follow on Instagram @albarrancabrera . The Series, Kairoslooks at how we might visualise the concept of “Now” in a not dissimilar way to the work I did back in C&N assignment 5, but uses gold leaf to separate two images of the same subject, taken at different times. They say that “the images are a metaphor for the fact that the past and the future are not real, just a human invention“. A concept that is right up my street!

As a result I am now revisiting the idea of sewing that I looked at in C&N. I have tried adding a gold thread to one of the images above, but it is not clear enough, so I need to explore other ways of showing “the gap which Now occupies”.